


One Flew Over

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Don't hurt me Ken Kesey, Gen, M/M, POV Second Person, Reincarnation, The Merlin torture never really stops, We're All Mad Here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-03
Updated: 2012-06-03
Packaged: 2017-11-06 16:56:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/421186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He says his name is Merlin, and he is a wizard.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Flew Over

There is a building near the outskirts of London. It is large and strangely foreboding behind its bars, yet at the same time peace radiates from the white walls and green gardens beyond the great gates. 

Tranquillity through control. 

A place where chaos is trapped and treated.

Through those gates and across the gravel path with such a pleasant crunching noise, the fresh smell of grass and flowers surrounding you, soothing you. Bringing you under the same calming spell as all the rest who pass through here. At first you tense at the thought, until you think of the sorts of people who are here and decide they need that kind of help. Or maybe that’s the spell talking.

It’s certainly not the first time you’ve heard that idea, from somebody who claims to know what he’s talking about.

Then the grand doors ahead of you slowly open and you’re abruptly inside, out of the light, the sun and the scents.

The sign over the desk in front of you welcomes you into a hospital, named for a saint you’ve never heard of. Your father gave up on Catholicism long before you had any opinion and you’ve never felt the need to go looking for those sorts of answers. Not since last year, at least.

The man with the broom and the overalls in the corner, who could live here for all you know, rolls his eyes at you and says, _Welcome to the madhouse._

This is a hospital. Not for sick bodies, but for sick minds.

Nodding to the woman at the desk, who recognises you from oh so many visits, and ignoring the grinning man, you move further inside, entering the warren of rooms and corridors. There are open rooms with TVs, fifteen people or more staring slack-jawed as a man in a shirt they must be imagining congratulates a woman who can’t be real on winning a holiday to a place that doesn’t exist anymore – not for them, at least.

Each of these rooms, reminding you of afternoons in a common room far away from here, lies at the centre of a network (you push away the analogy of a wasps’ nest because it’s not your thought) of sleeping quarters, enclosing the inmates – _patients_ – in the warm blanket of familiarity throughout the day. Stopping them from having to go too far from the lull of soaps and game shows.

Some of the beds in those rooms are surrounded by personal effects – pictures mostly, puzzles or books for those who want to convince themselves that all really is well _up there_ – but personality and identity are not the point of this place. This is somewhere you go when you have too much personality; too much individuality. The wrong personality. The wrong visions or thoughts or memories for a society where we are all cast from the same mould like plastic toys – or at least that’s what Mr Muirden says to you before joining the rest in agonising over Countdown.

Wrong memories. You know all about those. 

Of course, Mr Muirden is mad. The doctors say so, and in here, that means it’s true.

You walk past the rooms, the therapy sessions, the cafeteria that once again brings back old school memories; you find a door that, as strange as it may seem in this maze of indoors, leads back outside. Except inside those stone walls, there is no real outside.

There are more inmates – _patients_ – out here in another garden, really an extension of the calming grounds at the front of the hospital – _asylum_. Some of them are simply lying there on the ground, enjoying the sun. One is standing on a large flat rock, boasting about how he’s the reason the sun rose this morning; how Ra can never be truly trapped in this puny flesh. As you pass by him, he is challenged by a man who, being Jesus, takes issue with this endorsement of a polytheistic religion.

A woman, little more than a girl – Sophie, you think – dances past you, laughing as she talks to her fairies. Someday, she told you once, she’ll be a fairy too, and she’ll find a way to bring her father with her. You much prefer this to when she tells you how easy it would be to drown you.

You move past them all: the crazy, the sick, the delusional, and perhaps a few truth-tellers…

Until finally you stop at the dark-haired man with his ear pressed against a tree trunk as if he can hear something, lips barely moving as he murmurs strange sounds and words, either to himself or to the tree – you can never tell.

As you stop, he pulls away and says, _No idea how I fitted in one of these things._ Looking back at you (how does he always know when you’re here?), he adds, _Of course, it was a much larger tree. Too bad I broke it._

You’ve been here before, far more often than you would have ever wanted. You know the drill.

You sit down on the grass, take his hand and pull him down next to you. He comes willingly, for some reason always so trusting of you. It’s safer for him on the ground. Harder for him to hurt himself. He says likes it out in the open, or as open as it can get in here. He says it makes him feels closer to the magic.

He says his name is Merlin, and he is a wizard.

Somewhere there’s a record of his real name. The aides and nurses, even the doctors sometimes, call him _Merlin_ to humour him, or just to get him to listen, but you wish they wouldn’t. On a piece of paper in the building is his identity – his true identity. The one that belongs to him; the one you will always know him as.

Today he seems to be in what he would probably call a nostalgic mood: less eager to discuss magic or what could be done to change the present for the better (or so he insists); more eager to talk about fairytales.

_Gwen couldn’t help it,_ he says out of nowhere. _She loved Lancelot first. She always knew who she’d choose._

Unexpectedly, he gives you a sly look that makes something in your chest jump with what you’d like to think is just surprise. _A husband and wife in love with different people,_ he says slowly, looking at you so intently that you have that feeling you often get that he’s hinting at far more than he’s saying out loud. God, you hate it when he just jumps in like that.

His lips curl around the words, _Held together by how much they couldn’t be with who they wanted._

For a breathless moment, the two of you look at each other, the stranger – Merlin – in your friend’s eyes seeming to reach out to you on a frequency that should only belong to the man, not the broken mind. Before you can ask what he means though, his attention is suddenly elsewhere, on a daisy growing by your leg. _I could make these grow whenever I wanted,_ he sighs dreamily, sadly. _Now they have to hold all that magic themselves. I can’t help them._

You try to explain about seeds and photosynthesis, how a person can only help conditions, he can’t help the actual growth itself, but he gives you one of his looks, the same way he does every time you start talking science. Tells you, as he always does, that he doesn’t need to hear the new stories. The old ones don’t stop being right.

And once again he’s off somewhere else, back in a past he calls ‘his’ but which can’t have happened. Where he’s happy.

The tales he spins… If it weren’t for the sudden changes in subject, the jumps in time, not to mention his wholehearted belief that this is history, _his_ history (and yours), and not fiction, he could be a great storyteller. When you mention this, he pauses, before muttering darkly, _The world doesn’t want the truth. They all want fairytales._

Stories of knights and magic, recounted as if the two of you are discussing exploits in the past rather than fantasies in, well…an asylum. You can still remember times down the pub with this man, when _Merlin_ was a joke covering up the more serious problem on the inside until it was too late. God, just a year, and then he was here. Arguing with birds ( _Bastards think they know it all,_ he had snarled once when you interrupted one such shouting match) and drawing patterns in the air, speaking a language which you don’t recognise and the nurses ignore.

Merlin the magician ( _Warlock,_ he insists), the great enchanter, stares out at you from blue eyes that used to hold someone else: a friend, and one you will not abandon no matter what anybody says about the chances of recovery. Maybe there had even been something else under that: a possibility which barely had a chance to breathe before ‘Merlin’ suffocated it, despite how you still feel when he gives you those piercing looks. Moments like that, you hate ‘Merlin’, you hate all those writers who dreamt up Camelot, and you hate whoever or whatever made your friend this way.

_The Caesars were fighting yesterday._ The sudden piece of information from the here and now startles you out of your thoughts. Strangely enough, even though it seems like a good thing, you dread these flashes of lucidity, because of the guilt that creeps up on you when he seems to realise where he is. Where he’s been trapped. Yet he recalls the events as if they’re normal day-to-day business, which, you suppose, is true around here.

_Conquering, same as usual. Started with how one faints at the sight of blood, the other screams at spiders; snowballed into some big showdown about military strategies and how they would’ve united the whole known world… Well, you know that part. Too bad they never saw Albion, or magic. Can you imagine a Roman general there, with that?_

Here he stares at you so intently that you start to shift uncomfortably, thinking of home, your life, normality, _anything_ that isn’t here. Sometimes you think – you _know_ – that he’s trying to pull you into these memories, either to become part of his or to build some of your own so he won’t be alone. There are times when he reaches out and something inside you wants to reach back. It’s like he can see the conflict inside you, and he gets the strangest expression on his face: sadness, like he’s remembering some lost love or (and?) a dead friend, and at the same time apprehension, as if he’s taking a risk and he’s not sure if he should. As if something from that past is trying to stop the future he wants.

God, it’s a past _he_ created. Why can’t he change it to suit himself?

For once, you don’t stop the thought slipping out, either by accident or because you’re so tired of seeing your friend trapped by his own delusions about who he is.

Silence stretches out. He stares at you as if you’re suddenly a stranger. As if he doesn’t recognise you anymore. Panic suddenly stabs before you can stop it as you think of your brother, his father, and dozens of other people the two of you used to know together. He looked at them the same way when it all started to go bad.

Is this it, at last? Has that twisted part of his mind decided to cut you out the same way it cut out anybody who didn’t fit into that new view of the world? Are you, like your brother, going to be told that you shouldn’t exist? (Although that would be preferable to being told that you’re supposed to be a god, or a demon, or whatever you were in the end. His father never did recover.)

However, eventually, after your heart speeds up stupidly at the thought of losing him even though you already have, his expression collapses into resignation. _I guess you don’t understand anymore._ His voice sounds broken. _I can’t let it happen again. And I don’t want to lose us. The real us._ He leans forward and rests his head on your chest, and you let him, petting his hair because you can’t think of anything else. That’s why he came here: you couldn’t – _can’t_ – help him anymore.

_Gwen didn’t betray anyone,_ and as he says this you think you can hear real tears in his voice (you never understood why people said that before, but now you understand all too well), which distracts you for the moment away from your heart’s skip at the name. _She was in love,_ he stutters, _and she knew she wasn’t the only one._

_Morgana couldn’t help what the visions were showing her. When she left; when she felt like they were driving her out…_ You don’t know what he’s stopping for. Did he forget? But no, he remembers too much. His eyes flick up to a butterfly flying overhead, that strange language slips out again, and you have the strange sense that something more is being said, something that perhaps he thinks is personal.

When he comes back to you, or at least as much as you think he ever will, the sadness is back, stronger than ever. _I remember knights. I remember swords and sorcery, a million times more real than any of this fantasy world crap._

He says he’s keeping magic alive. Magic and Camelot.

More whispering, gibberish as far as you’re concerned, but he speaks as if it could all be understood. Sounds – words – are repeated like in any other language, and it just doesn’t sound like something made up on the spot. It sounds…real.

From behind you a woman’s voice says, _I’m sorry, but Merlin here has an appointment with the doctor now._

You look back, surprised because you didn’t hear her walk up. You guess you were too focused on the meanings in the nonsense words. Next to you, you feel your friend draw back, suddenly whispering in English, but not making much more sense, about lightning and deals and life and poison. A look reveals him crouched over, curled up, shoulders hunched defensively even as he clutches at your shirt as if he’s scared to let you go. 

The great warlock, who had once again almost convinced you that maybe there is some shred of truth in his stories or the words he says, is once more just a sick man. It’s a transformation that makes you feel more ill and disgusted at yourself every time.

The nurse holds out her hand to you, pitch-black hair falling down to frame her face, her pale skin (like your friend’s), her too-blue eyes. Smiling pleasantly at her, trying to ignore the frantic pleading next to you and the child-like grip on your sleeve, you take the offered hand and pull yourself to your feet. _I guess I lost track of time,_ you tell her, and her apple-red lips stretch easily into a smile.

You don’t know why he hates (fears) this woman. She’s trying to help him. She looks after him, makes sure he gets the help he needs, the drugs she tells you the doctors advise for calming his thoughts. Without her, he wouldn’t be getting better.

That’s what she tells you, at any rate: that he’s getting better, despite what it looks like to you. Soon the doctors, maybe with her help, will find a way to get him back to normal. Stop the false memories and restore the man you first met. These things take time, that’s all.

Whilst she’s telling you this once more, reminding you as she does every time she has to end your visits, she’s guiding you away, showing little reaction to your friend’s shouts behind you, save for her sympathetic expression and her comments. _It does him so much good to see you,_ she says, smiling soothingly and brushing at the wet patch on your shirt with a tissue, _but he does get worked up when you’re here. You’re part of his fantasy, I’m afraid, like me._

She winks, like you’re both in on a secret. _Best not come in for a few days,_ she advises, _just to be on the safe side. Give him a chance to calm down again._

You find yourself agreeing, even though you don’t like the idea of leaving him alone. Anything to help him get better though. Anything.

You’re at the doors leading back into the asylum – _hospital_. Back by the tree, he tries one last time.

_Arthur!_

The nurse laughs softly. Not a reaction you would normally like, except it’s one of those tinkling laughs that can’t help but brighten your day, non-threatening and full of happiness - obviously about something else, something that can’t possibly be your friend back there. She smiles at you again, almost hypnotic eyes sparkling at a joke or thought you probably wouldn’t understand, and says, _Don’t worry. For now we’re playing parts in his fantasy, but we can fix that._

_Say hello to your girlfriend – Gwen, wasn’t it? – for me, and remind Morgan to get some sleep. Those dreams can’t last forever; she knows that._

_Spend a couple of days at home, with your life._

_Merlin’s quite safe with me. ‘Arthur’._

You try to smile. You’d answer back the same way, but it’s a joke that hurts too much to join. Besides, you only ever heard her ‘name’ once. You prefer Naomi. 

You watch her start to walk back over to him, before looking away as you see him crawling backwards, shaking his head, pleading sounds reaching you across the garden. You walk in to get out, through the warren, past the man with the broom, through the doors, across the gravel and out of the gates.

_Freedom,_ you say to yourself, not knowing why.

(The pleas follow you. Does he still scream at night?)

Soon he’ll be free too: your friend, not the sorcerer who’s stolen him away and claims he has to stay. Free of all thoughts of _Merlin_ and _Arthur_ and all the rest of the myths.

No more Camelot. No more magic.

Free.

…

(So why is some part of you screaming to stop it happening?)


End file.
